She walked quickly away from Rose toward the back stairs and she must have heard Rose call her name, but she did not turn around or look back. Even after she had disappeared, Rose continued to look after her. She had remembered a hundred things to say to Mary, but she had not been able to remember the right thing to say. She knew that if she had been able to take away all the wrong words she would certainly have found, underneath them all, the one word that would kill pain, and kill it, and make it never come back anymore. There was such a word. She had known it once, and she knew it still, but she could not translate it for Mary. Father.

What Rose wanted was a word for Father. She wanted a word that she could say. There was a simpler word for Father now, but she did not know what it was. In his new form, he was formless and would not answer to Father. There was a word for him now, as he was now, but she did not know what it was, only that it was a common word, and that she ought to know it so that she could say it to herself in a whisper. Once, he took her to the abandoned quarry outside the town, and they stood together near the edge, and saw the glitter of water on the bottom far below them, and he had thrown a penny in, and they had watched it drop down, and he had told her that the penny would fall forever and that it would never stop falling, because the quarry was bottomless and the water they could see was only the beginning of a drop so deep that no man could imagine it. He said that for all he knew, and for all anyone knew, the penny might continue to fall through all eternity. And then he had laughed at her and told her that if she wanted to save money she should throw it in the quarry, because no one would ever find it there, and only she would know where it was. Only she, and only he.